First we will set up an Author’s account for you, at which point an email will be automatically sent to you with the login details.

Once you login, you will want to create your Page, in either of these ways.

This should give you the following window, some explanations provided below:

Write in the name of your page. It can be anything you want, but it will become the Title of your page. If you want to maintain privacy, do not write your own name here.

How you can upload your own images, explained further below.

Click on this icon to expand the toolbar into two rows, for more functionality.

Press Publish whenever you are ready to preview your changes.

The default is Paragraph (normal text), but you can change this to different Headings to highlight sections and text.

The rest of the items on the toolbar should be pretty intuitive and feel free to play around with them. Like working in a Word document (the numbered bullets 1-5 above can be found in the toolbar menu). Note that you can also copypaste text from a Word document while maintaining most of the formatting (images would need to be uploaded separately, and tables created separately).

Once you press Publish (item 4), your screen should look like this:

To view your new page, you can right mouse click the View Page link (top left red arrow) and choose Open Link in New Tab. This will open the page in a new tab in your browser. Usually you can jump tabs in your browser with either ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab. You can press Update (bottom right red arrow) any time while in this edit window, and once it shows it has updated, jump to the next tab, refresh the window (usually F5 for Windows browsers or Command+R for Mac browsers) to see the changes.

Note that this new tab has become the web address of your knew page and what you will need to send to us once you are ready for testing. In our case above, the output page would look like:

As explained in point 3 of the How to Prepare your Cover Letter page, each campaign using this method uses the above header to help the recipients know that your mail was sent from our service, so that they know it is not spam. The header may not look right on the webpage but gets fixed once sent by the software, as shown in some previews on the How to Prepare your Cover Letter page.

Inserting Images

I used Heading 2 for this title above. Nice how it separates sections, eh? Feel free to do the same in your cover letter.

To insert an image, press the Add Media button (point 2 above), after which you should see the following window:

Press the Upload Files tab to get the above window, then Select Files to choose an image from your computer.

HOWEVER, note that the maximum image size is 2mb, in which case you may want to resize your image beforehand. It is better to resize and crop your image before uploading to get it to the size you want, otherwise it may make your campaign email unnecessarily large. Many recipients do not like receiving large emails, and resizing your image afterwards can be cumbersome.

You should notice an Uploading progress bar. Once it has been successfully uploaded, you should see the following window:

You will notice that your image has a check mark and is selected as the top left of the images.

In the bottom right of this screen, before you press the Insert Into Post button, you can set the Alignment. For this webpage I chose to align left, as you can see to the left of this text, but this feature does not work with the email software, so it is better to keep as either Center or None. If you want to create this same left or right alignment feature, you will need to use a table, as explained below.

Use “Link To” if you want the recipient to be taken to a special webpage when they click on the picture in your email.

“Size” is better kept at full.

Tables

If you really wish to use this alignment feature, such as in this email campaign:

you will need to use a table. But I’m warning you, it’s going to be more complicated!

First upload/insert your image near to the text where you want to align it left or right. In my example above, you will see the picture of me in Prague aligned to the right of two paragraphs. In hindsight I realised I should have put the text “Dear Translation Agency” also within the table, to remove some of the space above and below the two paragraphs. I will use the Joe Translator example at the top of this page to help explain it:

I have added a bit of text for the alignment (the second paragraph). If this all seems intimidating to you, if you prepare the text and images with instructions, I can take care of the rest for you for around $20 (depending on how many images).

Press the Text tab (red arrow at the top right) to show the source code:

Now “simply” move the text and pictures to replace the LEFT COLUMN and RIGHT COLUMN. Since I want my picture to the right of the text, the final outcome will look like:

<table style=”width: 100%”> <tr> <td style=”width: 350px”>Put your text here. You can add images and play with the toolbar just above.

I will now put a picture just below these two paragraphs so that I can later move it to the right of them.</td><td style=”text-align:center”><a href=”http://homeworktranslationjobs.com/cover-letters-cvs-resumes/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/me_CV.jpg”><img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-16″ src=”http://homeworktranslationjobs.com/cover-letters-cvs-resumes/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/me_CV.jpg” alt=”me_CV” width=”200″ height=”230″ /></a></td> </tr></table>

I colour coded it for you to show how simple it really is, and here is the explanation. The code for the table is coloured in orange. <tr> refers to “table row”, while <td> refers to a cell or column in a row. </td> means end of a column. So <tr><td></td><td></td></tr> means two columns within one row.

For the first column I added style=”width: 350px”, which means that the width of the first column will be 350px. You can adjust the number 350 to get the effect you want.

For the second column I added style=”text-align:center”, because I wanted my picture aligned in the center of that cell.

The final outcome should look like:

Okay, not perfect, but like I said before, the email software will fix it all and we can test it before launching.

Links

If you want to create weblinks (will work in the email too) from text in your campaign, simply select the text you want to link from and press ctrl+k (or command+k in Mac) and fill or copy in the necessary information. You can also use the Link icon in the toolbar.

Conclusion

The simple template explained in point 1 of the How to Prepare your Cover Letter page may suffice plenty for you, but if you want to go a step further, since better impressions can sometimes make the difference, you can try this approach. Even if you just put your picture aligned in the center of a section, without the use of the fancy tables, combined with formatted text (bold, coloured etc.), it will make your campaign look much more impressive.

After translating and managing translation projects for more than 20 years, I'm happy to teach others the ropes and move on to other interests. My greatest perk from this profession is that it has given me the freedom to work when and where I want, and eventually to loosen the straps and travel freely around the world.